UCL DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY
School of Public Policy Working Paper Series: ISSN 1479-9472
Working Paper 23
Access to EU political institutions:
Political leaders and working groups
Rainer Eising
Dr Rainer Eising, Hagen University, Germany
The support of UCL Friends Programme is gratefully acknowledged.
School of Public Policy
University College London
The Rubin Building
29/30 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9QU, UK
Tel 020 7679 4999, Fax 020 7679 4969
Email spp@ucl.ac.uk
www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/
Date: July 2006
Access to EU political institutions:
Political leaders and working groups
Abstract
The paper analyses the access of interest organizations to the EU institutions drawing on
data from 800 business interest associations and 34 large firms. It argues that these contact
patterns derive from the salience of the contacts for the political actors and the interest
groups, the opportunities enshrined in the EU institutional setting, and the characteristics of
the interest organizations. Replicating the design of previous access studies, the analysis
yields other empirical results than these and traces the differences to the different types of
data that have been used in the studies. The study identifies a differential access of EU
associations, large firms, and national associations to the EU institutions and points to
important variations between the working level of these institutions and their political
leadership.
Introduction
The relations among the EU institutions and business interest groups have become a major
element in the governance of the European Union. Many scholars consider the access of
interest groups to the EU institutions as important because systematic variations in these
access patterns can result in biased politics. Thus, finding an elitist bias in these contact
patterns, Thomas Hueglin (1999: 260) transferred Ernst E. Schattschneider’s well-known
comment on the political process in the United States to the European Union: ‘the heavenly
chorus sings with a strong upper class accent’. David Coen (1997, 1998) arrives at the same
conclusion when characterizing the EU patterns of interest intermediation as a form of ‘elite
pluralism’ (see also Cowles 2001). The systematic analysis of these access patterns is all the
more important because, according to Liesbet Hooghe’s study of the European Commission,
its officials maintain almost as many contacts with interest organizations as with Members of
the European Parliament (MEP) or with officials in the Council of the EU. The Commission
officials are only more often in touch with national civil servants than with business interest
groups (Hooghe 2001: 64-65). They are also more frequently in touch with business interests
than with diffuse interests.
2
It is therefore puzzling that there are only few studies that systematically analyze the access
of interest groups to the EU institutions. In their seminal study of European interest group
politics at the beginning of the 1970s, Jean Meynaud and Dusan Sidjanski (1971: 491-638)
outlined the contours of a ‘morphologie d’accès’ to the European institutions that already
expressed what has become the conventional wisdom about these contact patterns: Among
the various routes that the interest organizations could take to influence the institutions of the
early European Communities, they highlighted the importance of the Commission for the
interest organizations and pointed out that the access to the Council of the EC occurs for the
most part indirectly, by national interest organizations via those national departments that are
in charge of the policy dossier and send their experts in the Council working groups. Interest
groups would only rarely seek and obtain access to the Council as a collective decision
making body. Given that the European Parliament had then only a consultative status in the
formulation of EU policies and was composed of national parliamentarians, they (1971: 577586) ranked it, together with the Economic and Social Committee, only as an institution of
secondary importance to interest organizations. A large part of the relatively few contacts
with the members of the European Parliament would come about through initiatives taken by
national associations rather than by Eurogroups.
In recent years, and based on an analysis of the financial sector, Pieter Bouwen (2002a, b)
has put forward a parsimonious explanation of these access patterns. He suggests that the
‘organizational form’ matters most when the access of interest organizations to the EU
institutions is to be explained. He compares the access of three forms of organizations: firms,
EU associations, and national associations. 1 According to him, these types of organizations
differ in the number of contacts with the EU political institutions because they can deliver
different ‘access goods’. He singles out (2002b: 11-12) the information that interest
organizations can provide (see also Crombez 2002). The argument is that the three types of
organization differ in their capacity to deliver specific kinds of information to EU policymakers: Supposedly, firms are best at delivering expert knowledge about markets and
technologies, EU associations control information about the so-called ‘encompassing
European interest’ of their members, and national associations command information about
the ‘encompassing national interest’ of their members. He does not analyze empirically
whether the organizations are in control of these access goods but investigates the contact
patterns of EU politicians and officials with these organizations as an empirical test for his
3
propositions. His analysis builds on interviews with Members of the European Parliament as
well as officials of the Commission and the Council of the EU who indicated the frequency of
their interactions with firms, EU associations, national associations, and political consultants.
This empirical evidence is important, but also piecemeal. It draws only on evidence provided
by the demand-side, it is based on a single economic sector, it disregards variations among
the firms and among the associations, and it neglects explanatory factors beyond the
expertise of the interest organizations. It also aggregates contacts at different levels of the
political institutions. In this article, I intend to broaden the study of the access patterns by
drawing on data from interest groups that operate in different economic sectors, considering
cross-national variations, and looking at different levels of the state institutions, namely the
level of the political leadership and the working levels.
I argue that the access patterns are shaped by the salience of the contacts, the institutional
opportunities, and the capacities of the interest organizations. In this study, I replicate some
elements of Pieter Bouwen’s study by comparing the mean access of the interest
organizations to the EU institutions. Then, I validate the outcome of this analysis by studying
in more detail the relations that have emerged among state and business at the EU level.
Information provided by firms and associations about their access to EU policy-makers
serves to test the reliability of the previous study. The outcome puts into question some of its
findings that build on interviews with EU bureaucrats and politicians. I then set out to explain
the different results of the two studies, tracing them in part to the different data that have
been employed.
The politics of access in the European Union
Access to the EU institutions: salience, opportunities, and capacities
I define access as the frequency of contacts between interest organizations and EU
institutions. This definition emphasizes that interest organizations obtain contacts with EU
political institutions and do not just aim at them or forego their access opportunities. It
excludes indirect ways and means to exert influence on policy-makers via the public or the
media. Therefore, the access concept is better suited to study the representation of interests
by business which is said to pursue insider strategies and seek face-to-face negotiations with
policy-makers than the activities of social movements for which the mobilization of the media
and public is more common. This access concept implies either a successful attempt of an
1
To some extent, Bouwen also considers the professional consultancies, but less systematically than the other three
forms of organization so that I do not consider them here.
4
interest group to approach the EU institutions or the incorporation of an interest group into
EU policy-making by these institutions. Disentangling the contacts between state and
business from their initiators, it captures strategic choices on part of the political elites. I
argue that political access results from the salience of these contacts for the interest groups
and the political institutions, the political opportunities enshrined in the institutional structure,
and, finally, from the organizational capacities of the interest organizations.
Salience and political exchange
The salience of the contacts is rooted in resource dependencies among state institutions and
interest groups. None of them can autonomously pursue and achieve their political goals.
Hence, the access patterns cannot be fully understood without an exchange paradigm. The
EU institutions depend on interest groups for their information, for their consent, or their
active cooperation. As their regulatory tasks generate a huge demand for information and
cooperation (Meynaud and Sidjanski 1971: 523; Majone 1989: 163), some authors maintain
that the political money in the EU is information (Bouwen 2002a, b). Actors use their
information strategically to achieve outcomes that are closest their own preferences
(Crombez 2002). The ensuing information exchange increases the knowledge of the actors
about EU policies and their consequences, and it also reduces the uncertainty about the
positions and strategies of other actors. This can sometimes promote an understanding of
each other’s position even though it does not necessarily facilitate an agreement.
Some organizational features make for the dependence of the EU institutions on external
advice: in relation to their Europe-wide tasks, they have only limited resources at their
disposal. Being detached from the implementation of EU policies on domestic grounds, they
are in need of information that enables them to devise policy proposals that solve the
problems at hand, can be administered by the members states, and win a sufficient majority
among the legislators in the Parliament and the Council (Meynaud and Sidjanski 1971: 552;
Mazey and Richardson 2002: 148).
The EU institutions have recourse to several sources of information. International
organizations, member state administrations, think tanks, interest organizations, and
scientific experts give important policy advice. This reduces the risk that actors withhold or
manipulate information. The incentives to retain information or provide false or are further
reduced by the fact that many actors are involved in a series of policy games in which their
reputation may suffer if they have proven to be unreliable. Now, firms and business interest
associations are particularly important sources of information because in the area market
5
regulation, standard setting, and external commercial policy. Notably in these areas, EU
policy-makers appreciate their technical and economic information as well as their knowledge
about the preferences of their members.
Given that EU policies have long centered around market integration, the European
institutions consider their involvement in the development of EU policies essential. Business
interests seek access to the EU institutions to receive information about the development of
EU policies and wield influence over them in negotiations with the state institutions. James Q.
Wilson (1980) has pointed out that individuals, groups, and firms are motivated to respond to
regulatory policies because they must either carry their costs or may obtain substantial
benefits from them. In his theory of the European regulatory state, Giandomenico Majone
stresses the costs of EU regulation that fall upon firms and individuals (1996). Usually,
business interest organizations seek direct access to policy-makers in order to wield
influence over public decisions (Wilson 1973). However, having access to the EU institutions
does not imply that these contacts change the course of events. Even many discussions with
EU policy-makers may not bring about the desired results. Even if EU politicians take
business concerns into consideration in EU legislation, this is not necessarily a consequence
of their interactions with business organizations. It may simply be the result of convergent
policy preferences. What is more, in some instances EU institutions may even co-opt interest
organizations in order to pursue their own policy preferences.
In short, access is not equal to influence in the sense that the input of interest organizations
shapes the substance of EU policies. However, several scholars argue that there is a positive
relation among the access of interest organizations to EU policy-makers and their influence
on EU policies (see Meynaud and Sidjanski 1971: 465; Beyers 2002). Those organizations
that are regularly in touch with EU officials and politicians are well positioned in the EU policy
process. They are usually well informed about EU policy-making and can process this
information to their members whereas those organizations that are only infrequently in touch
with the EU institutions lack that information and depend on other interest groups or national
institutions to deliver it to them. Everything else being equal, it is likely that the regular
contact partners of the EU institutions are also important coalition partners of other interest
organizations because they are in a better position to exert influence on EU policies. In sum,
the study of the access pattern serves to identify the features of those organizations that
assume crucial positions in EU policy networks as well as important patterns of the political
process in the European Union.
6
The institutional opportunities
While the salience of the contacts motivates interest groups and EU institutions to exchange
information and negotiate with their counterparts, the institutional setting defines the
opportunities of interest organizations to get in touch with the EU decision makers. Earlier
studies illustrated that the European multi-level system offers interest organizations multiple
points of access (Pollack 1997; Grande 1994; Marks and McAdam 1996). As Meynaud and
Sidjanski have argued: ‘la configuration et l’importance respective des accès dépendent du
pouvoir officiel de décision depuis le stade de l’élaboration initiale jusqu’à celui de l’adoption
finale’ (1971: 468). This article limits its attention to the institutional opportunity structure at
the EU level.
The EU is marked by its pronounced institutional segmentation (see Peters 1992). In the first
pillar of the EU, the European Community, interest groups enjoy relatively good access to the
European institutions. This is less so in the other two pillars of the European Union which
cover the common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and police and judicial co-operation in
criminal matters. These two pillars operate more intergovernmentally, and, as such, involve
much less input from the Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Courts.
This allows member governments to prevent interest groups from gaining access to the EU
policy process. For most interest groups, then, the EC pillar provides the greatest potential
for access to the EU institutions, not least because it comprises the vast majority of the
Union’s regulatory and distributive policies. Therefore, the subsequent analysis concentrates
on the European Community.
Enjoying a monopoly over policy initiation in this pillar and being granted a crucial role in
agenda setting and policy formulation, the European Commission is considered to be the
most important point of contact for interest groups in the EC (Coen 2002: 263-264; Mazey
and Richardson 2002: 135-136). It has also acquired important powers under the so-called
delegated legislation in policy implementation which comprises the large majority of EU legal
acts. 2 Many interest organizations underline that is difficult to obtain substantial modifications
of a Commission proposal once it has been presented to the European Parliament and the
Council of the European Union (Meynaud and Sidjanski 1971: 550). It is not uncommon that
the final Council decision is largely identical to the proposed text. Therefore, it is important for
interest organizations to take action before the Commission has formed its opinion and
2
According to Rinus Van Schendelen (2002: 63-64), 82 per cent of the EU legal acts in the year 2000 were matters
of delegated legislation in the comitology system of the EU. Only 18 per cent fell under the secondary legislation upon
which the Council, and, depending on the decision-making procedure, the European Parliament decide.
7
finalized the details. As the EU’s ‘guardian of treaties’, it also has an important role to play in
monitoring the compliance with Community law by member-states and nonstate (or private)
actors. The Commissioners are its most senior officials and nominated by the member state
governments subject to a vote of approval by the European Parliament. Even though the
Commission exercises its powers collectively, it is rarely approached as a collegiate body.
Being organized into several Directorates-General (DGs) each of which is responsible for
specific policy areas, interest groups tend to maintain relations with one or more of these
DGs. The Commission has developed elaborate standard operating procedures and
strategies to incorporate them into EU policy-making. The central role of the European
Commission in EC policy formulation leads to the first hypothesis :
H1
Interest organizations maintain more contacts with the Commission than with the
other EU institutions.
The European Parliament (EP) is the EU institution that has changed the most over time.
Being initially a consultative body, it has acquired substantial legislative powers and ‘is now a
force to be reckoned with across a wide range of policy domains’ (Wallace 2005: 65).
Nonetheless, even now, the EP is often held to be less important to interest groups than the
Council or the Commission because its influence varies greatly according to the issue at
hand and the decision-making procedure that applies. Since they are nominated by national
parties and elected by national voters, the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are
said to be more amenable to national pressures than the Commission and also more open to
diffuse or public interests, including those representing the environment, consumers, or large
groups such as the unemployed and pensioners. As a consequence, some analysts regard
the links forged between interest groups and MEPs as ‘coalitions of the weak’ (Kohler-Koch
1997: 6–7). According to Mazey and Richardson (1993: 12), the normal pattern for producer
groups is still to see the EP ’very much as a secondary arena’. In general, the heads of the
Standing Committees and the rapporteurs who draft the EP amendments to EU policy
proposals are considered to be the most important addressees for interest group demands.
The interest groups don’t find it easy to access the relevant actors in the EP because its
members commute between Strasbourg, Brussels and their electoral districts and the
parliamentary majorities are more unstable than in the member states. The EP is organized
in party groupings of which the largest and most important are the European People’s Party
and the European Socialists. In many issues, the rules of the EU legislative process
prescribe an absolute majority in the parliament and make necessary or, for that matter,
8
facilitate an informal grand coalition of the two large parliamentary parties (Hix 2005).
However, given the lack of party-political discipline that emerges, in general, in parliamentary
systems where the parliamentary majority supports the government that is in charge, in the
EP, the importance of territorial, institutional, party-political, and issue-specific decision
criteria varies to a greater extent.
Owing to its pivotal position, the Council of the EU is a highly relevant point of access for
interest groups and consists of a series of specialized councils in different issue areas. The
main legislator of EU policies consists of ministers from the national governments. Its
meetings and the common decisions are prepared by the Committee of Permanent
Representatives (Coreper I and II) that consists of the heads and deputies of the member
states' permanent representations in Brussel, and the numerous Council Working Groups
that are composed, for the most part, of national experts. Given its relatively few meetings in
Brussels, the Council and its administrative machinery are rarely lobbied in Brussels. Rather,
domestic interest groups tend to address their concerns to particular government
departments, representing their specific interests at national level. While the Council’s policy
positions evolve along national lines, in part as a consequence of pressure by domestic
interests, the European Council is more removed from interest group pressure. Not only does
it comprise the heads of state and government (as well as the President of the Commission),
thus representing the general interest to a greater degree, but it also meets formally only
once every six months, lessening its impact on the minutiae of day-to-day politics in the EU.
Therefore, the analysis concentrates on the EU Council. The second hypothesis is:
H2
Interest organizations maintain more contacts with the European Parliament than
with the Council of the European Union.
In general, it can be expected that the interest organizations have more frequent interactions
with the working level of the EU institutions than with their political leadership. European
integration consists largely of technical details that are put in place by a technicobureaucratic structure (Mazey and Richardson 2002: 136). The desk officers in the
Commission and in the Council working groups as well as the rapporteurs of the EP
committees are responsible for drafting the policy proposals or sorting out their details. It is
estimated that some 70 per cent of Council texts are agreed in its working groups, another 15
per cent in Coreper or other senior committees, which leaves only some 10-15 per cent to the
ministers (Wallace 2005: 58). Accordingly, the bureaucratic staff depends heavily on the
information and the support of the interest organizations. In contrast, the attention of the
9
Commissioners and the Ministers is usually not directed towards all policy details but focused
on those aspects of an EU directive that are contested or that are considered to be
particularly important. On the part of the interest groups, lobbying them aims either at
establishing broad policy principles – such as the attempts of the European Roundtable of
Industrialists to mobilize support for the Internal Market Program amongst the member state
governments (see Cowles 1997) –, at revising decisions that were taken before in the policy
process – such as the German Chanceller Schröder’s well-known intervention in favor of the
Volkswagen AG –, or at raising the stakes in favor of a specific policy alternative rather than
others. Hence, less frequent access to the political leadership does not imply that these
contacts are less important for interest groups than those at the working level.
H3
Interest organizations maintain more contacts with position holders at the working
level of the European institutions than with their political leadership.
As the EU judiciary, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) monitors compliance with and
interprets EU law. European law takes precedence over national law and grants rights to
individual citizens that the national courts must uphold. As a consequence, the preliminary
rulings procedure, which offers a channel for national courts to refer questions of European
law to the ECJ, allows interest groups to challenge the compatibility of domestic and EU law.
However, in practice, to take a case to the European Court usually demands that a body of
EU law already exists. And even where this is the case, the outcome of such action is
uncertain, the financial costs heavy, and the duration of the case generally lengthy, which
means that this avenue is clearly not available to all citizens and interest groups, and will only
be worthwhile when the stakes are felt to be especially high.
Finally, the Economic and Social Committee (ESC) is a distinctive institution in this context,
as it was set up to channel the opinions of organized interests within the European policy
process. However, as this tripartite body has only consultative rights in EU legislation, it is
generally considered to be of marginal importance for the representation of interests. Direct
contacts between the EU institutions and interest organizations are now much more
important than this institutionalized forum for interest intermediation.
Organizational form and organizational capacities
This section explores the proposition that different forms of organizations vary significantly in
their access to the EU institutions, comparing large firms, EU associations, and national
associations. It is trivial to state that not all firms are equally well equipped to take political
10
action at the EU level. To a large extent, a firm’s dependence on associations and its
capacity to act individually at EU level is determined by its size (see Coen 1997, 1998). Small
firms tend to rely on their national and European associations to represent their interests
because they do not have the resources to sustain substantial public affairs capacities.
Lacking also investment power, they must unite to gain political clout. In contrast, large firms
control substantial economic resources that allow them to act unilaterally and turn them into
relevant interlocuters for state actors.
It is interesting to note that, despite these capacities, many large European firms relied on
national lobbying. Several firms were national champions (see also Hayward 1995) that had
either been nationalized or received a preferential treatment at the domestic level. Many firms
were not only preoccupied with regaining their national market in the 1950s and 1960s, but
enjoyed also excellent access to their national governments which would see after their
interests in the European arena and could veto European policies that ran against them.
Moreover, initially, the Commission had a distinct preference for consulting community-wide
interest organizations rather than national associations or firms so that it would not need to
arbitrate amongst different national points of view and might even find an integrationist
perspective in the interest group proposal (Meynaud and Sidjanski 1970: 394-395).
Notably, the firms responded to the threats and opportunities enshrined in two broad
regulatory initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s: On the one hand, they mobilized against
European social regulation and the efforts to introduce regulations for Works Councils in
multinational firms by the end of the 1970s (Vredeling directive), and, on the other hand, they
supported EU market integration and the Internal Market Program when they were facing the
European economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s and growing international
competition (Sandholtz and Zysman 1989). The failure of national government programs to
address these problems provided incentives for European big business to organize at the
European level (Cowles 1997).
Given the economic and political ‘Eurosclerosis’, the Commission also reviewed its stance on
the involvement of firms in the making of economic policies. It started to work directly with a
number of firms to find solutions for the problems plaguing industrial sectors such as the steel
industry and to devise research and technology policy programs for the European High Tech
industries (Sandholtz 1992; Grande 1993) Meanwhile, there are several important examples
for the emergence of Commission bodies that brought together Central Executive Officers
(CEO) from large firms: e.g., the Competitiveness Advisory Group, the Bangemann Group in
11
Telecommunications and Information Technology, and the Transatlantic Business Dialogue
on international regulatory issues (see Coen 2002; Cowles 2001).
As a consequence of the increasingly felt political weight of the European institutions and the
loss of their governments’ veto powers in the Council due to the Single European Act and
subsequent treaty reforms, the firms pressed also for changes of the membership direct
membership and participation in the committee work. Nowadays, several direct membership
organizations at the European level exclude national associations, such as the Roundtable of
European Industrialists that consists of roughly 50 Central Executive Officers of large
European companies (Cowles 1997, Coen 2002). The public affairs activities of the firms
have also become more professional including greater attempts to coordinate the lobbying
efforts of international subsidiaries and the establishment of public affairs offices in Brussels.
In light of these developments, some analysts claim that the European Commission has
come to work more closely with large firms than with associations (Coen 2002; Cowles 2001)
labeling this a form of ‘elite pluralism’ in the European Union. To the EU institutions, it can be
important that associations do not exert direct control over the economic resources of their
members whereas large firms command tremendous investment power. Furthermore, their
economic and technical knowledge is usually closer to the market than that of associations
(Mazey and Richardson 2002) As they are also important players in their home markets,
large firms may also serve the EU institutions as avenues to exert influence on national
governments. Maria Green Cowles highlights the role of the European Round Table of
Industrialists and its CEO members in persuading national governments of the benefits of the
Internal Market Programme (1997). In sum, there are good reasons to believe that large firms
have better access to the EU institutions than other interest organizations and that a form of
elite pluralism has emerged in the EU..
H4
Large firms have better access to the EU institutions than associations.
Similarly, not all business associations will have equal access to the EU institutions. In
particular, their location in the EU multilevel setting shapes the political activities of business
associations. It is unlikely that domestic groups will be equally active at the EU and the
national levels of government. These organizations are embedded in domestic structures and
social relations and depend on the routine exchanges with domestic partners from whom
they extract resources (see Wilson 1973). Only if the EU regulation has an important impact
on them and their members, if the division of labor among them and those EU associations
which represent them in EU politics is unsatisfactory, or if the terms of EU policy
12
implementation at the national level must be worked out, will they extend their activities to the
EU level. Hence, national associations concentrate on domestic institutions whereas EU
associations focus on EU institutions.
H5
EU business associations maintain more contacts with the EU institutions than
national business associations.
I assume that theses expectations (H 4 and H 5) hold across the institutions. Hence; I do not
agree with the proposition that the relative access of firms, national associations, and EU
interest groups varies across the Council, the Parliament, and the Commission because
these institutions are in need of different exchange goods (Bouwen 2002a, 2002b: 13-16).
According to that reasoning, the Commission would depend mostly on the expert knowledge
that firms possess about markets and technologies because it helps it to promote European
policies. Given that it must ensure the support for its policy proposals in the other EU
institutions and amongst interest groups, it would also be interested in the information EU
associations can provide about the ‘European encompassing interest’. Only then is it short in
supply of the knowledge national associations possess about the ‘domestic encompassing
interest’. Given that it is a supranational institution whose members are responsible to
national voters and that it must scrutinize and modify (or reject) the Commission proposals
and seek consensus with the Council, the European Parliament would seem to be mostly
interested in the information EU associations provide about the encompassing European
interest, followed by the knowledge of national associations about their domain. Finally, in the
EU institutional framework, the EU Council is the most intergovernmental institution whose
task it is to amend the Commission proposals and decide upon them. It would therefore be
most interested in the information about the ‘domestic encompassing interest' that national
associations can provide. Given that the national governments usually seek to reach
consensus in the Council and must also find a consensus with the parliament when the codecision procedure applies, the Council is also in need of some information about the
‘European encompassing interest’. Table 1 summarizes the expected rank order of the
contacts that the interest organizations maintain with EU institutions.
In the empirical analysis, Bouwen (2002b: 24) does not find support for his hypothesized rank
orders: First, EU associations maintain more contacts with the Commission than firms, and
these have more frequent access to the supranational bureaucracy than national
associations. The conclusion would be that the European Commission is more dependent on
the European encompassing interest than on expert knowledge about markets. Second,
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European associations do not have significantly more contacts with the EP than national
associations, but both maintain more contacts with MEPs than large firms do. It follows that
the European Parliament demands as much information about the European encompassing
interest as about the national encompassing interests but depends less on the firms’ expert
knowledge about markets. Thirdly, national associations have the best access to the Council
of the EU, closely followed by firms. EU associations have clearly less access. Thus, the
Council members are mostly interested in the domestic consequences of EU policies, and
then they depend on market knowledge provided by firms. The subsequent section analyzes
whether these empirical findings are also supported when using different data.
Table 1
Expected and empirical ranking of interest organization contacts with EU
institutions and national governments
Political institution
All EU institutions
European Parliament
Expected and empirical rankings of interest organizations
1. Firm > EU associations > National associations
2. EU association > National association > Firm
3. EU association = National association > Firm
European Commission
2. Firm > EU association > National association
3. EU association > Firm > National association
Council of Ministers
2. National association > EU association > Firm
3. National association > Firm > EU association
Note: 1. xxx, expected ranking, 2. Bouwen expected ranking 2002b: 17, 3. Bouwen empirical ranking
2002b: 24.
The empirical analysis
The Data
These hypotheses shall be tested in a study that combines Lijphart’s comparable cases
research strategy (1975) with statistical methods. Important context variables are controlled
by focusing on a particular category of collective actors in EU member states with several
common features. The cross-sectional analysis is based on a survey which was conducted
between June 1998 and March 1999. 3 The survey focused on two classes of actors. It
addressed 1,998 German, French, British, and EU business associations and asked them to
specify their patterns of interest intermediation. In addition, 68 large firms in these countries
have been questioned. Due to its large size and broad sectoral coverage, 4 the analysis gives
a good indication of the cumulative responses of business interests to European integration
after almost 50 years of the integration process. But note that there is no time series data
3
The sample is based on the following sources: Oeckl 1996, Conseil National du Patronat Francais (1997),
Henderson and Henderson (1995), European Commission (1996).
14
available (yet) on this topic and that only few questions in the questionnaire cover the time
dimension. Overall, 834 responses were received (see table 2). Excluding international
associations, the rate of return was 40.9 per cent, and the return rates for the different subgroups ranged from 32.3 per cent in the case of the French associations to 50.0 per cent in
the case of the large firms.
Table 2
The rate of return of the survey
Multinational
firms
Total
EU
associations
German
associations
British
associations
French
associations
420
727
501
350
68
2066
Questionnaires returned
185
322
206
113
34
860
Questionnaires excluding
international associations
Rate of return excluding
international associations
162
321
204
113
34
834
40.8
44.2
40.9
32.3
50.0
40.9
Trade associations
addressed
The sample excludes public interest groups because their organizational logic differs to some
extent from that of business interest groups (Offe and Wiesenthal 1985; Olson 1965).
Instead, the study focuses on producer and employer associations. This means that the
largest family of interest organizations active at the EU level is covered: about 80 per cent of
the EU associations are business interest associations (see European Commission. General
Secretariat 2002).
The focus on the large member states - France, Germany and the United Kingdom – holds
important background conditions fairly constant: these are the country size, the level of
economic and technical development, the relevance of these countries in EU decisionmaking, their formal decision rights, and their long duration of EU membership. Therefore,
the findings presented here cannot be easily translated into the contexts of the worse-off
member states (Portugal, Spain, and Greece) whose economic structures diverge somewhat
or into the contexts of those member states that entered the European Union only in 1995
(Sweden, Finland, Austria) because these were only recently exposed to the full influence of
the European Union. Evidently, this holds all the more for the new member states of the
Eastern enlargement.
4
Economic branches from agriculture, industry, and services are included. The largest branch is trade with a share
of 13.8% of all associations.
15
The access patterns
I test the presented hypotheses by comparing the mean access of the interest organizations
to the EU institutions. T-tests (pairwise comparisons) compare the mean access of each type
of interest organization – EU associations, national associations, and large firms – to different
EU institutions (H 1 – H 3). Analyses of variance identify whether the mean access to each
EU institutions differs across the different types of interest organization (H 4 – H 5). They are
supplemented by pairwise post-hoc comparisons (not reported) that identify the significant
differences. Access has been measured on a six-fold scale that includes the following
classes: no contacts, annual contacts, half-yearly contacts, quarter-yearly contacts, monthly
contacts, weekly contacts.
Figure 1 illustrates the average access of the firms and the associations to the EU
institutions. All types of organizations maintain significantly more contacts with the
Commission (at working level) than with the MEPs and the position holders in the Council of
the EU, confirming H 1: Perhaps not surprisingly, this confirms that the European
Commission is the most frequent addressee of interest group demands at the EU level.
Contacts with the officials at the working level outnumber the contacts with the political
leadership of the Commission and the Council, confirming H 3. However, H 2 is not
empirically supported: Whereas both EU and national associations have more frequent
contacts with the European Parliament than with the Council of the EU which was expected,
this is not true for large firms. They present their arguments as often to the EP committees as
to the Council machinery.
The hypotheses about the importance of the organizational form and the location in the
institutional setting find only partial empirical support: As expected (H 5), large firms and EU
associations maintain clearly more contacts with the EU institutions than national
associations. The EU institutions are more dependent on the technical information and
economic clout of firms and on the European encompassing interests of EU associations
than on the ‘domestic encompassing interest’ of national associations. Many large firms and
EU associations have become regular interlocuters of the EU institutions, whereas most
national associations maintain only occasional contacts with them. Large firms maintain more
contacts with the EU institutions than national associations because these mobile and
resourceful actors are able opt out of their domestic contexts whereas most national
associations remain tied to them. EU associations communicate more frequently with the EU
16
institutions because they serve as European information brokers and act as interest
intermediaries for their members.
However, contrary to H 4, firms do not interact more frequently with the EU institutions than
EU associations. While they have much better access to the EU Council than the EU-wide
associations, they do not have more contacts with the Commission officials and the
parliamentary committees than the Eurogroups. 5 Even when taking into account the relatively
small number of firms in the EUROLOB survey, the differences among firms and EU
associations are less pronounced than the characterizations of the EU as a system marked
by elite pluralism would suggest. Both firms and EU associations have become regular
interlocuters of these EU institutions. However, the firms have significantly better access to
the Commission’s leadership and to EP members than the EU associations, indicating
important intra-institutional variations. It must be borne in mind, though, that the contact
density of the firms with the Commissioners and their Cabinets, the Members of the
European Parliament, and the Council is rather low in comparison with that at the working
level. In correspondence with H 3, the bulk of their political activities are devoted to
influencing the details of EU legislation.
In sum, the decision-making rationality varies both across the EU institutions and within each
institution: The political clout of firms counts more in the higher echelons of the Commission,
among the MEPs, and within the EU Council than among the policy experts in the
Commission and in the Parliament. The latter are also open to the information provided by
EU associations. These act and speak for their EU-wide constituencies and provide
information about their ‘European encompassing interest’ outweighing the expert information
and the investment power of large firms. Access to the higher strata of the EU institutions is
more selective and, for the most part, restricted to the corporate actors. Firms have roughly
similar access to the parliamentary and executive institutions at each level. Even though this
pattern depends partly on the greater specialization of Eurogroups on interest representation
than is common among national associations (Greenwood 2002), this finding puts the
characterizations of the EU political process into perspective. In fact, it suggests that ‘elite
5
ANOVAs for access to EU institutions by firms and associations: European Commission working level: F 56.109
df between 4, df within 829, p .000; European Commission leadership: F 52.172 dfb 4, dfw 829, p .000; European
Parliament F 31.874, dfb 4, dfw 784, p .000; Council of the EU F 36.525 dfw 4, dfb 759, p .000. Post-hoc comparisons
indicate significant differences for all institutions among EU associations and firms, on the one hand, and national
associations, on the other. There is just one significant difference among national associations: the mean access of German
and British groups to the working level of the Commission differs. The post-hoc comparisons do not indicate significant
differences among EU associations and large firms regarding their access to the EC working level, but regarding their
access to the EC leadership, the Council of the EU, and the EP members.
17
pluralism’ is more pronounced in the member states than at the European level – no matter if
these nations are deemed to be corporatist, statist, or pluralistic.
Figure 1
European Union contacts among state and business (means)
6
5.2
5
4.8
Mean number of contacts
4.5
4.2
4.1
4.0
4
3.6
3.4
3.2
3.1
3.1
2.8
3
2.8
2.7
2.4
2.0
2
2.3 2.2
2.1 2.1
1.9
2.0
1.7
1.9
1.8
1.8
1.6 1.5 1.6
1,7
1
EC working level
EC leadership
MEPs
EP committees
Council of Minsters
COREPER
Institutions
EU assoc.
D assoc.
UK assoc.
F assoc.
Firms
Note: 1 no contacts, 2 annual, 3 half-yearly , 4 quarter-yearly, 5 monthly, 6 weekly
The hypothesized the access of the interest organizations to the EU institutions (H 1 – H 3)
has been largely confirmed. Unsurprisingly, the European Commission has proven to be the
most important addressee of interest group demands at the EU level. Compared to the
findings reached by early studies of EU interest intermediation (Meynaud and Sidjanski
1971), the European Parliament draws nowadays far more attention of interest organizations
to itself. As expected, all types of interest organizations maintain the least contacts with the
Council. However, the expected ranking of the interest organizations found only partial
support (H 4 – H 5): As assumed, national associations have fewer contacts with the EU
institutions than EU associations or large firms. But the access of the large firms and the EU
associations does not differ as much as was expected highlighting the importance of
technical expertise, investment power, and EU-wide constituencies in EU level interest
18
representation. Moreover, surprisingly, associative interest intermediation seems to play
greater role in EU politics than in national politics.
The relations among EU institutions and interest organizations
A closer inspection serves to validate these findings In what follows, I scrutinize whether the
interest group access to information, their activities during the policy-making cycle, their
initiation of the contacts, and their cooperation with the policy-makers support the outcome of
the access analysis or shed new light on it. Those interest organizations that have access to
them find it not very difficult to obtain information from the Commission and the Parliament.
On a scale ranging from one (very difficult) to six (not difficult at all), on average, the EU
associations score between 4.4 and 4.8. Without a noteworthy difference among French,
German, and British groups, the national associations achieve between 4.0 and 4.4, and the
firms have scores between 4.8 and 4.9. The access to information from the Council is much
worse. Furthermore, there are important variations among the interest organizations. Firms
and EU associations have better access to information from the Commission than national
associations, and, in correspondence with the outcome of the access analysis, firms find it
also easier to obtain information from the Parliament and the Council than the other
organizations.
19
Figure 2
The access to information from the EU institutions (means)
6
4.8
5
4.9
4.9
4.7
Access to information
4.4
4.4
4.3
4.8
4.3
4.4
4.3
4.4
EU
4
4.4
4.1
4.0
D
UK
F
Firm
3
2
1
European Commission
EP
Council
EU institution
Note:
(1) very difficult – (6) not difficult at all
The activities of the interest groups across the policy-making cycle vary. Given that the
primary task of the EU institutions is still the conception of common policies rather than their
execution, it can be expected that the interest organizations are more active when the EU
institutions design policy proposals and decide upon them than during the implementation
stage. Figure 3 illustrates that it is indeed quite common for the interest organizations to
represent their interests frequently vis-à-vis the Commission when its services devise EU
directives and regulations. 6 However, only a minority of them is able to raise their voice
already when the EU policy agenda is being set. Given ‘the unpredictability of the European
policy agenda’ (Mazey and Richardson 1993: 11) this is hardly surprising: ‘the market for
policy ideas within the EC policy process is much broader and is more dynamic than in any
one national policy system. This is no doubt beneficial in terms of policy innovation, but the
ensuing process is more difficult for everyone – including groups – to manage. ... new ideas
and proposals can emerge from nowhere with little or no warning, simply because the
6
Associational measures for the timing of interest representation at the EU level by associations and firms: Agenda
Setting: CHI2 95.005 (df 8), p = .000 Cramer-V .250; Commission proposal: CHI2 69.152 (df 8) p = .000 Cramer-V .211;
European Parliament debate: CHI2 47.148 (df 8) p = .000 Cramer-V .177; EU Council debate: CHI2 32.217 (df 8) p = .000
Cramer-V .147; Transposition: CHI2 66.938 (df 8) p = .000; Cramer-V .209; Implementation: CHI2 62.565 p = .000
Cramer-V .204.
20
Commission has seen fit to consult a particular group or a particular expert’ (Mazey and
Richardson 1993: 22). Large firms and EU associations are more likely than national
associations to deliver position papers to the EU policy-makers or give their expert opinion on
them when the political agenda is being set and when EU policies are being formulated and
debated. Among the national groups, German associations are earlier involved in the game
than the other groups. French groups are basically absent from the early stage of the policymaking process.
Figure 3
The timing of lobbying activities at the EU level (per cent of firms and
associations)
100
90
Per cent of firms or associations
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
E C p ro p o s a l |
E P d e b a te |
never
C o u n c il d e b a te |
s o m e tim e s
F
rm
Fi
K
U
U
D
E
rm
Fi
F
K
U
U
D
E
F
rm
Fi
K
U
U
D
E
F
rm
Fi
K
U
U
D
E
F
rm
Fi
K
U
U
A genda |
D
E
F
rm
Fi
K
U
U
E
D
0
T ra n s p o s itio n | Im p le m e n ta tio n
o fte n
The interest group activities tend to decrease once the Commission has delivered its
proposals to the Parliament and the Council, underlining the crucial position that the
Commission assumes in the EU legislative process. Many associations regard the Parliament
still as an institution that is only of secondary importance to them even if the gap to the other
institutions has narrowed over time. By contrast, the EP draws as much attention of large
firms to it as the Commission. Also in these stages of the policy-making cycle, the EU
associations and firms are more vocal at the EU level than the national groups. When the
policy proposal is discussed by the Council, national groups direct their attention to the
national governments rather than the Council as a collective decision-making body: Only 31
21
per cent of the German groups, 19 per cent of the British organizations, 26 per cent of the
French associations, but 53 per cent of the large firms claim to be frequently active at the EU
level when the Council working groups meet, Coreper debates, or the Council of Ministers
takes its decision.
In the final stages final stages of the policy-making cycle, these patterns do not hold any
longer: When EU policies are being transposed into national law or implemented in the
member states, the domestic associations and the firms are far more interested in discussing
the details of EU legislation and the nitty-gritty of the implementation process with the EU
institutions than the EU associations. These tend to confine themselves to influencing the
early stages of the policy-making cycle while leaving the details of the decentralized
transposition and implementation to their national members.
The firms and the associations tend to initiate the contacts themselves rather than to rely on
other interest organizations that provide links to the EU institutions or to wait for invitations to
participate in committee meetings, hearings, or expert groups. 7 Among the EU institutions,
the Commission involves interest organizations routinely into the policy-making process, but it
includes only a minority of the organizations frequently in these deliberations. The EP is far
less inclined to recruit the expertise of firms and interest organizations in its meetings and
hearings, and this is even more true of the EU Council. The Commission includes 36 per cent
of the EU associations and 27 per cent of the firms frequently into its deliberations. Given the
variety of interests they confront, the EU institutions structure the participation of interest
organizations in the policy-making process to a greater extent than national institution sso
that they established a great variety of consultative structures (Eising and Kohler-Koch
1999b; Mazey and Richardson 1993; 2002).
7
Associational measures for the contact initiatives at EU level: Firms or organizations themselves: CHI2 99.049 (df
8) p = .000 Cramer-V .252; Other interest organizations: CHI2 26.756 (df 8) p = .001; Cramer-V .134; European
Commission: CHI2 67.948 (df 8) p = .000 Cramer-V .214; EU regulatory authorities: CHI2 18.283 (df 8) p = .019 CramerV .115; European Parliament: CHI2=51.641 (df 8) p = .000; Cramer-V .188; Council of the EU: CHI2 26.556 (df 8) p =
.001; Cramer-V .115.
22
Figure 4
Contact initiatives at EU level
100
90
Per cent of firms or associations
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Firms or assoc. |
Other org.
| Commission |
Never
Sometimes
Eur. Parl. |
F
rm
Fi
K
D
U
EU
F
rm
Fi
K
D
U
EU
F
rm
Fi
K
D
U
EU
F
rm
Fi
K
D
U
EU
F
rm
Fi
K
D
U
EU
0
EU Council
Often
These patterns correspond well with the EU institutional structure. However, their
organizational capacities and their location in the EU multi-level system trigger some
important variations among the firms and the associations. First of all, not only are firms and
EU associations far more likely to start political initiatives than national associations. The EU
institutions are also more likely to take the initiative and include them into the policy-making
process rather than national associations. This preferential treatment is an important asset of
the Eurogroups vis-à-vis their national members. Among these, the British associations
attempt less often than the French and German groups to approach the EU institutions.
Second, the EU associations rely less on other interest organizations to provide links to the
EU institutions than the national associations and firms, confirming that several of them have
become important intermediaries between their members and the EU institutions. Finally, the
consultation practices of the EU regulatory authorities do not reflect the criteria of the other
EU institutions. They consult national associations as frequently as EU associations about
EU standards and regulations whereas they incorporate firms slightly less into these
discussions.
Conclusion
The access patterns in the European Union are shaped by the salience of the contacts for
the actors, the institutional opportunities of interest organizations and their organizational
capacities. In many respects, they resemble the domestic processes of interest
23
intermediation regarding EU affairs. The analysis confirmed the central position of the
European Commission in the policy-making process and illustrated that the importance of the
European Parliament for interest organizations has increased over time. The organizational
capacities of the interest organizations and their institutional location were not as important
as was expected. In particular, the differences among large firms and EU associations are
less pronounced than was expected. Both have become regulator interlocuters of the EU
politicians and officials whereas national associations are only infrequently in touch with
them. Accordingly, the technical expertise and economic clout of firms matter as much to the
EU politicians and bureaucrats as the ability of the Eurogroups to represent the interests of
their members during the early stages of the policy-making cycle.
More specifically, these findings differ from the results that were obtained by Pieter Bouwen.
There are two major reasons for these differences: First of all, the different research designs
account for the different findings: Pieter Bouwen has conducted a group comparison in which
the EU officials and politicians were asked ‘to establish a ranking of their contacts with the
different forms of business interest organizations’ (Bouwen 2002b: 20). This procedure does
neither indicate how many contacts firms, EU associations, and national associations
maintain individually with parliamentarians or politicians. Nor does it identify the central
tendency or the dispersion of the access patterns of each type of interest organization
because the group sizes differ and the organizations that do not maintain contacts with the
EU institutions are omitted from the analysis.
The exclusion of those organizations from the analysis that do not maintain contacts with EU
politicians and bureaucrats tends to exaggerate the access of that group in which contacts
with the EU institutions are heavily concentrated on a sub-set of organizations – namely the
national associations. Only those national groups that evolved into multilevel players and
represent their interests regularly at both the EU level and vis-à-vis the national institutions
(Eising 2004) have approximately as many contacts with the EU institutions as EU
associations and large firms. Hence, even though, according to Bouwen’s analysis, the MEPs
may have roughly as many contacts with domestic interest organizations as with EU
organizations, his ranking does not allow for the inference that national and EU interest
organizations have similar access to them. Nonetheless, his analysis sheds much light on the
overall balance of interest organizations that are consulted in the financial sector.
Second, the studies conceptualized the access to the Council in different ways because
Council members and officials have a dual affiliation: They are at the same time members of
24
the EU legislative and their national governments or administrations. The EUROLOB survey
conceived of the Council as a collective EU institution. When taking the contacts of interest
groups with their national governments at the domestic level into account (see chapter 5), the
ranking of the interest organizations’ contacts with the Council changes: Firms still maintain
the most contacts with the national representatives, but they are now followed by national
associations and only then by EU associations. This comes closer to Bouwen’s results even
though the ranking of firms and national groups is still reversed in the two studies. In sum,
this article puts into question the results of previous studies on the access patterns in EU
politics.
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